After his marriage fell apart, Cole moved to the countryside to try and rebuild his life and figure out what went wrong.  He supported his wife, gave her everything she wanted or needed, and he truly doesn’t understand why she paints him as the bad guy.  When he meets Lennie, the two appear to have an easy connection.  All is not as it seems, however.  Is Cole truly the good guy that he envisions himself to be?  Or does he use the trappings of being a good guy to coerce and force women to give in to his every whim and desire?

Araminta Hall’s latest, One of the Good Guys, takes a look at gender, power, and fear, and how, despite most men claiming to be good, most women are still afraid to walk home alone in the dark.  This does seem to be something of a recurring theme in Hall’s work, as she claimed the last novel of hers I read stemmed from “the continued injustices perpetuated against woman in our so-called civil society.”  One of the first books published under Gillian Flynn’s new imprint, it was an interesting read, although you could see the turn against Cole coming from a mile away.  But maybe that was part of the point.  These guys hide in plain sight and don’t exactly survive the smell test once you scratch beyond the surface.